Martian Neighborhood Hyllie

At the center of most European villages is a church or a castle. In Hyllie, the first structure was the spaceship. The hotels, malls, condos and office buildings came later. This is how Martian towns will develop, where the oldest structures will be vessels which have landed.

Topsoil is a valuable commodity, and the topsoil in Hyllie was stripped away and sold many years ago. The earth in the southern part of Sweden is among the most fertile ground in all of Europe, yet Hyllie’s land is not hospitable. To some extent it has been marsformed already, the opposite of terraforming.

In Hyllie as you observe the landscape from the Martian crater, you see very few people. You might see someone on the bicycle path, or other visitors to Agrikultura, but otherwise it looks uninhabited. Yet there is a sizeable population in the neighborhood. Where are they all? Inside the mall, or the office buildings, or the hotels, where the windows don’t open, sealed environments in which the air temperature is controlled by computers, and machines are constantly circulating the air with sophisticated pumping mechanisms.

In Hyllie, people are already living as if they are on Mars.